My Preview of Coming Attractions triggered a number of
interesting comments, so I am going to dedicate this post to replying to some
of what has been said. As always, I
thank you for your continuing participation in this blog. It has become, in effect, an endless seminar,
with a large number of thoughtful participants, both those who comment and those
who do not.
1. S.
Wallerstein asks why a Marxist like me is fascinated by Kant. Well, Kant was my first love, which explains
a part of it. But more than that, I do
not choose my intellectual associates on the basis of their compatibility with
my politics. I find Michael Oakeshott’s
work fascinating and instructive, even though he is, or was, the intellectual
guru of English conservatives, and I take the very greatest pleasure in reading
Kierkegaard, even though I am an atheist.
I am beguiled by the beauty of clear, profound, elegantly constructed
arguments. I have strong political
commitments, but at the very deepest level my response to ideas is aesthetic
rather than ideological.
2. Jerry, not
only do I underline books and write marginal comments, I also cannot read a
student paper without doing the same, a fact that slows me up something awful
when I am grading a stack of papers.
Fortunately, I do not often have a truly rare book in my hands. I know that one can make marginal comments to
an e-text, but I find that to be a barbaric custom. I also have an immediate sensory response to
the feel and loo and smell of books. My
favorite book – for sensory and for intellectual reasons – is the Selby-Bigge
edition of Hume’s Treatise.
3. Anonymous –
I was unaware of the Nietzsche passage you quote, but upon reading it, I am
afraid I find it rather superficial and, dare I say it, juvenile. I understand why Nietzsche might have been
irritated by the enormous respect paid to Kant in his day, but his comments do
not seem to me to rise above the level of really class schoolboy snark.
4. S. Wallerstein
again. I love the fact that cartesiano means exceptionally clear and
logical. When I first got our Paris
apartment, I decided that to improve my terrible French, I would read In Defense of Anarchism in the French
edition. To my delight, I found that in
French I was cartesiano –
exceptionally clear and logical. Then it
occurred to me that probably in French everyone
sounds cartesianio!
5. mesnenor
suggests that one read the Objections and
Replies with the Meditations. Indeed!
There is a lovely story associated with them. It seems that Descartes sent copies of the Meditations to all of the most important
philosophers in Europe with precise instructions as to how to read them: First one day on each of the six Meditations,
resting, as is appropriate, on the seventh day.
Then spend a week re-reading and thinking about each Meditation, for a
total of seven weeks in all. Then send
comments. Descartes was very put out
when comments began to arrive by return mail.
What is more, the most serious objections to Descartes’ arguments, which
first-rate philosophers have managed to cough up over the last four hundred
years, were to be found in those instantaneous replies!
6. matt, it
sounds to me as though you have gone way beyond what I would ever suggest! If you studied the Critique with Bob Howell and Paul Guyer, then you had the best
there is. That is fabulous. As for Locke’s First Treatise, I agree that it is tediously dull, but it does put
the important Second Treatise in an
interesting light.
7. Tom, that is
lovely about Kermit Roosevelt and the Penn connection. I must ask Tobias about him.
Well, that will do it for now.
3 comments:
How to balance aesthetic tastes (Kant, Beethoven, Homer, etc.) with political commitments is an unanswered philosophical question, as far as I know. In addition, political commitments may clash with a taste for creative, but politically uncorrect authors: Nietzsche, Dostoyevsky, T.S. Eliot, even contemporary figures of lesser weight such as Mario Vargas Llosa or Michel Houellebecq. One learns fairly young that the most creative authors are not necessarily the most politically correct ones and that certain aesthetic pleasures seem "sinful" from the point of view of one's political commitments. I guess one has to play it by ear in this area, so to speak.
A bit off topic: I just learned that Cedric. Robinson died June 5. I knew him briefly at UCSB.
Were you familiar with his critique of Marx? of his work on race in general?
You've probably read the other Tobias Wolff's childhood memoir, "This Boy's Life," if only out of curiosity. If not, I can't recommend it strongly enough. It's a testimony to sublimation. Equally good, though very different, is his brother Geoffrey's "The Duke of Deception."
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